Chaudière Falls from Parc des Portageurs - KAP 2008-11

February 27, 2008.
The objective of this KAP outing (Kite Aerial Photography) was to photograph the Chaudière Falls from the Québec side of the Ottawa River. The Chaudière Falls are in the middle of the river, and distanced from public access by the river itself as well as private industry, primarily E.B. Eddy. Besides the out-of-the-ordinary overhead perspective that Kite Aerial Photography provides, it is also an excellent means to get closer to distant subjects. This was also an opportunity to get a unique perspective on the city core. The kite and rig were launched from Parc des Portageurs in Gatineau (what is formerly Hull) which is at the corner or rue Montcalm and rue Laurier across from the office complex Les Terrasses de la Chaudière.
It is tricky getting the correct exposure in this type of winter situation (mix of very light and very dark areas depending on the orientation of the camera), particularly when you have to fix the camera settings before the camera leaves the ground. I exposed for snow in this session with an EV of +2/3. This gave good exposure when the white predominated in the picture. Some of these images are slightly overexposed in the white areas since the scene was already balanced between light and dark areas and the exposure compensation wasn't required. Other shots which had predominantly dark areas (especially where there were large areas of exposed water) should have had -ve compensation and therefore the whites were grossly overexposed and I have not included any of these images. There are ways around this such as sending the camera up twice with different exposure settings, re-shooting all the angles as best as possible. The other alternative would be to bracket the shots of each session and this is recently possible with cameras such as the Canon powershot A570IS with the application of CHDK technology and scripts for bracketing. The camera never stays still as it would on a tripod, so even when bracketing, the composition would likely be quite different within each bracketed series. This is one of the challenges of KAPing. Thank heavens for digital cameras.
There are power lines shown in several pictures which, for safety reasons, I stayed well away from with the kite and rig. They were further away then my 500' line anyway. When the wind is right, I'll probably do the falls from the opposite side (Ontario side of the river) which may be a bit closer to the falls and there would be no power lines to be concerned with.